Abstract
Manuel García Carpintero defends a form of antirealism for the explicit talk and thought both about fictional entities and scientific models: a version of StephenYablo’s figuralist brand of factionalism. He argues that, in contrast with pretense-theoretic fictionalist proposals, on his view, utterances in those discourses are straightforward assertions with straightforward truth-conditions, involving a particular kind of metaphors or figurative manner. But given that the relevant metaphors are all but “dead”, this might suggest that the view is after all realist, committed to referents of some sort for singular terms in the relevant discourses. He revisits these issues from the perspective of the more recent work on them and applies his view to recent debates in semantics on the role and adequacy of supervaluationist models of indeterminacy.
Financial support was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research projects FFI2016-80588-R and FFI2016-81858-REDC, and the award ICREA Academia 2018 funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. A version of this paper was presented at the Workshop on Imagination and Fiction in Scientific Modelling, University of York, 2019; thanks to participants for their comments, in particular to the organizers Mary Leng and Fiora Salis; thanks also to Ali Abasnezhad and Marta Campdelacreu, and to Michael Maudsley for the grammatical revision.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. García-Carpintero (forthcoming-a) for elaboration and defense.
- 2.
- 3.
Cf. however Kroon (2015) for a serious challenge.
- 4.
Kroon and Voltolini (2016) offer helpful discussion and further references.
- 5.
Like Thomasson (2015, 262) (specially so given my ultimate fictionalism), I am not much disturbed by Brock’s (2010) main criticism of created fictional characters concerning the particular circumstances of their creation. Everett and Schroeder’s (2015) alternative proposal that they are spatially discontinuous concrete “ideas for fictional characters” is insightful. I cannot go here into the reasons why I think the “social construct” account I favor is more apt, nor address the intuitions that they (ibid., 284–5) marshal against it.
- 6.
There is no difference in these respects with other communicative acts; they also generate (when they do not misfire) social constructs of that kind, cf. García-Carpintero forthcoming-a.
- 7.
Cf. MacDonald (1954, 177): “Characters, together with their settings and situations, are parts of a story”.
- 8.
For reasons I cannot go into here (García-Carpintero 2019e), if we hold this view of textual and paratextual discourse, we should take both expressions like ‘Pierre Bezhukov’ in War and Peace which do not pick out any actual person, and those like ‘Napoleon’ which do, as equally having the associated representations as semantic values. Although I cannot elaborate this point here, it plays a very important role in the account of models in general and semantic models below.
- 9.
Instead of characterizing the singular representations the proposal takes fictional characters to be in terms of discourse referents we could invoke mental files, insofar as we think of them as public and normatively characterized; cf. Orlando (2017), Terrone (2018). What about expressions of plural reference, like ‘the Hobbits’, or ‘the Dwarves’ (Kroon 2015)? I assume these could be handled in a related way, given an adequate semantic account; cf. Moltmann (2016) for discussion of how such an account should look like.
- 10.
This semantic proposal for referential expressions in textual and paratextual discourse is an elaboration of Frege’s view that referential expressions shift their semantic values in intentional contexts to what in extensional contexts are their senses; Sainsbury’s (2018) “display” account of attitude ascription is an alternative. If paratextual uses of referential expressions occur (implicitly or explicitly) in intensional contexts, as on Lewis’s (1978) view, the parallel is immediate for them. Textual uses would also straightforwardly fit the bill if they were also elliptical for some operator-involving analogue of (2), as Devitt (1981, 172) and Orlando (2017) defend. This is objectionable, however, as Bertolet (1984)and Predelli (1997) pointed out; the proposal in the main text obtains essentially the same result without positing implicit operators.
- 11.
In Thomasson’s (2003) terms, the relevant pretense in textual and paratextual uses is not de re (vis-à-vis artifactualist fictional characters) but de dicto. However, the presuppositional account of singular reference I uphold, unlike Thomasson’s construal of the relevant contents merely as existential generalizations, conveniently explains the impressions of singularity for such uses that writers like Friend (2011) rightly emphasize (García-Carpintero 2010b, 2018). Maier (2017) offers a DRT implementation of ideas very close to mine, except for his quasi-Meinongian account of metatextual discourse, for which I favor the Yablonian proposal below.
- 12.
- 13.
A mother tells her child “the cowboy should now wash his hands for dinner”. She is making an utterance that would be true-in-the-pretense if certain conditions obtained (mother and child are playing a game of cowboys and Indians, with specific principles of generation), with the intention of asserting such conditions (i.e., that the boy dressed as a cowboy now has certain obligations). Cf. also Evans (1982, 363–4).
- 14.
- 15.
Cf. Cameron (2012) and von Solodkoff (2019) for similar views. Their proposals, however, raise a serious concern: in general, we do not want to say that entities are fictional just because they are grounded on more fundamental entities. Social constructs (which is what products of speech acts are, on my view) nonetheless exist as social kinds, even if they should be grounded on more fundamental entities (Schaffer 2017). Why should it be different with fictional characters? After all, on the realist proposal made above they have exactly the same ontological status as social constructs like speech acts. The figuralist account helps here: even if conventionally standardized, apparent references to fictional characters in metatextual discourse are just metaphors (hypostatizations), and, as such, we do not need to assume that they are actual successful references to characterize the contents of claims made by means of them.
- 16.
- 17.
As Everett (2013, 143) neatly puts it: “I do not mean to deny that in some cases the entities invoked by certain fictional realists, who then go on to identify these entities with fictional characters, genuinely exist. My complaint is simply that, in these cases, the relevant entities are not fictional characters; the identification made is wrong”. Cf. also Paganini (2020).
- 18.
If we adopt (as I think we should) Williamson’s (2018, ch. 10) view that philosophy resorts to models in the same spirit as sciences, we may think of the imaginary referents posited for referential expressions in metatextual discourse in Maier’s (2017) formal account as fictions exactly along the lines suggested in the next section for semantic models. Williamson in fact illustrates his suggestions with semantic models for intensional discourse.
- 19.
- 20.
Cf. García-Carpintero (1993, 123, 128), Glanzberg (forthcoming). More on propositions momentarily.
- 21.
Cf. Yalcin (2018), Williamson (2018, ch. 10). I do not share Yalcin’s Chomskian skepticism regarding the intuitive adequacy of the contents ascribed to utterances (sentences-in-context) by semantic theories, but I won’t go into this here, cf. García-Carpintero (forthcoming-a).
- 22.
Cf. Yalcin (2014, 18–23) for more details on those explanatory goals. Systematicity concerns the fact that speakers who, say, competently understand ‘John loves Mary’ can equally understand ‘Mary loves John’; productivity, the fact that competent understanding is in principle unbounded: ‘the son of Mary swims’, ‘the son of the son of Mary swims’ … .
- 23.
“Smaller” not just spatiotemporally (say, limited to events in our light cone), but also at the level of detail (say, domain of individuals, relevant features, etc.) at which events are specified.
- 24.
Leitgeb (forthcoming) provides an interesting alternative that surrenders less of classical logic than standard supervaluationism. The idea, in a nutshell, is to have the semantic theory specifying truth-conditions for the object language relatively to an arbitrarily chosen admissible precisification. For reasons indicated in a moment, I prefer a complex account of the sort outlined below that heavily relies on supervaluationist notions. But I could make the points below for which I appeal to plurivaluationist ideas by relying instead on Leitgeb’s account.
- 25.
Fine (1975, 282f.) describes these two possibilities with a nice metaphor: “Ambiguity is like the super-imposition of several pictures, vaguenessVagueness like an unfinished picture, with marginal notes for completion. One can say that a super-imposed picture is realistic if each of its disentanglements are; and one can say that an unfinished picture is realistic if each of its completions are. But even if disentanglements and completions match one for one, how we see the pictures will be quite different”. Vagueness here is a deficit, ambiguity (as Fine designates the first option, which manifests I think his own preference for the other) over-abundance.
- 26.
As usual in discussing these matters, I am ignoring here the additional complexity created by higher-order vagueness—the fact that theoretical notions that we use in our metalanguage like borderline case or admissible precisification are themselves vague; that, as Williamson insists, we are doomed to conduct our investigations of these matters in a language that exhibits the very phenomena we are theorizing about. Heck (2004, 123) warns against making the case for higher-order vagueness too easily, but I think it can be convincingly made anyway.) In my view, Caie’s (2018, 128–32) and Sud’s (2020, Sects. 5–6) arguments to stick just to the plurivaluationist view underestimate the problems posed to their proposals by the vagueness of our theoretical discourse itself (Rohrs 2017, 2194–7), and they overlook the resources of the pluralist view I will outline; but I cannot develop these points here.
- 27.
- 28.
This creates a systematic ambiguity, of course not unlike the one generated by Fregean “reference shifting” accounts, which must be dealt with along the lines of extant proposals for that case; cf. Orlando (2017) for discussion.
- 29.
García-Carpintero (2020) discusses how this ontic indeterminacy arises as almost a matter of course for the realist view of fictional characters. An additional virtue of thus ascribing vague propositions to sentences including vague expressions is that we thus alleviate the concerns about SI raised by Fodor and Lepore (1996).
- 30.
García-Carpintero (2013b) embraces this model for future contingents, deploying a non-standard “thin red line” form of supervaluationism on which truth is bivalent and non-equivalent admissible precisifications account for worldly indeterminacy at a time. Abasnezhad and Hosseini (2014) develop this model in precise detail for the case of the referential indeterminacy of ‘there’ or ‘Kilimanjaro’ in the examples above.
- 31.
Frigg and Nguyen (2016, 235) raise an interesting objection involving cases of theoretical models lacking targets. I do not have much to add to what Levy (2015, 797) says in response; there is no difficulty on the present account in understanding such “targetless systems” as just pieces of conceptual, mathematical machinery.
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García-Carpintero, M. (2021). Models as Hypostatizations: The Case of Supervaluationism in Semantics. In: Cassini, A., Redmond, J. (eds) Models and Idealizations in Science. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65802-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65802-1_8
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